Accessing Your Inner Buddha

Welcome to Evolving Humanity.

This newsletter is about equipping top performers to conquer challenges, achieve holistic success, and craft a legacy that shapes a brighter world.

To really enjoy it, you have to be enough of a narcissist to believe that you create your own reality, but not so much that you're an asshole. ??

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In today's newsletter you'll:

• Find out why Americans have become so lonely, depressed and mean - and what you can do about it
• Explore how Radical Kindness will transform your life
• Learn the 5 Steps to a State deeper than Flow State & the One Mistake to avoid at all costs
• Enjoy life more by getting deeper into practical aspects of running your Human Operating System
• Access your Inner Buddha by tweaking the Parameters of your Attention
• Find out the ??Secret to Happiness & Top Performance

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If you're a subscriber to the Atlantic, David Brooks recently published an article about why Americans have become so lonely, depressed and mean. It's profound, well written, and I encourage you to read it.

If you're not a subscriber or you're short on time, here's a summary, mostly quoted, of the article (formatting added by me):

• Americans have grown lonelier, more depressed and more mean.
• "The percentage of high-school students who report 'persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness' shot up from 26 percent in 2009 to 44 percent in 2021."
• "Murder rates have been surging, at least until recently. Same with gun sales. Social trust is plummeting...The words that define our age reek of menace: conspiracy, polarization, mass shootings, trauma, safe spaces."

Why?

"We inhabit a society in which people are no longer trained in how to treat others with kindness and consideration. Our society has become one in which people feel licensed to give their selfishness free rein."

The antidote: re-vivify our cultural and institutional emphasis on moral formation.

"Moral formation... comprises three things....

1. helping people learn to restrain their selfishness.
2. teaching basic social and ethical skills.
3. helping people find a purpose in life.

Morally formative institutions hold up a set of ideals. They provide practical pathways toward a meaningful existence: Here’s how you can dedicate your life to serving the poor, or protecting the nation, or loving your neighbor.

So the questions before us are pretty simple:

• How can we build morally formative institutions that are right for the 21st century?
• What do we need to do to build a culture that helps people become the best versions of themselves?"

This is a newsletter dedicated to the latter. The Human Operating System gives us agency to create a culture that supports every person being their unique individual best version, and yet is shared by us all.

An added benefit is that forming strong personal values and meaning in your life is core to any well functioning Human Operating System.

Finally, an imperative I took from Brooks' article; something we can all do right now - practice radical goodness.

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Be A Self Programmer

Act Now! Install These Behavioral Applications:

• Practical Radical Goodness with yourself: start by learning to be at your best
• Practical Radical Goodness with everyone: be kind, and help bring out their best

Get started now! ??

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Radical Goodness Saves Lives

Life can be difficult.

Keeping your own self operation simple and easy is critical.

Following the radical kindness theme, streamlined self operation comes in two forms:

Internal: radical goodness with yourself

External: radical goodness to others

So what's the best way to practice radical goodness with yourself?

Simply put: anchor yourself to the natural, at-rest, ground of your own being. Mastering this state and allowing it to be the natural position you come back to if you're not doing anything else, is the ultimate kindness.

This state is you in neutral. It allows the system of you to be at rest. Which means it's also a state of natural healing and wellbeing.

And in general, it feels good, open, comfortable, satisfied, and fulfilled.

Most people were never given this simple, practical tip about operating themselves.

However, this simple, one-pointed approach to consciousness (accessing, deepening and stabilizing this fundamental state of being), will lead to the happiest, healthiest and most high performing version of you.

It's also the place from which you'll design and create your ideal life.

Let's learn how ??

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5 Simple Steps to Start Accessing a State Deeper than Flow State & the One Mistake to Avoid at All Costs

If you’re unhappy, unhealthy, or underperforming it’s because you don’t know how to use yourself. It’s not your fault - psychology is broken. But if you don’t learn, it just gets worse.

These five simple steps will get you started on engineering yourself for epic wellbeing and performance:

Behavioral Install

1. Identify: what it feels like when you're "at your best". Think of a few times you've experienced this. Pay attention to how you felt and how your experience of the world changed while it was happening.
2. Understand: In order to feel like this, your body has to organize itself in a specific way that's different than when you're not like this.
3. Learn: the specifics of the internal conditions. Specifically, attend to how your body is organized when you are in this state. Pay attention to: your posture, breathing ??, how fast (or slow) you speak or think, the tonus of your lower abdominal and back muscles, your focal length (you probably soften your eyes), and anything else that stands out. (See the image ?? below)
4. Choose: Make the number 1?? aim in your life: to be in this state.
5. Specify: one activity, context, or relationship to bring this state to. Do it until you have succeeded. Then, move on and bring it to other contexts.

The #1 Mistake to Avoid

NEVER make important decisions when you're out of this state. Especially if you're feeling bad.

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Now let's go a bit deeper...

Enjoy life more by getting deeper into practical aspects of running your Human Operating System

In the last newsletter, I outlined the 6 Networks of Intelligence that form your Human Operating System and described what each of them does.

Today, I want to explore practically how it works, so you can begin to "reboot" your early Networks.

The first thing, always, is to gain access to your deepest / best self, as outlined above.??

Get the basic hang of it.

This is the most natural state of all, so you'll recognize it when you're in it.

In fact, most of the time when we're feeling "bad" it's because we intuitively know there's a deeper, better way of experiencing the world.

The beauty (and difficulty) is that the state is binary - you're either in it or you're not.

When you're in it, because it's the most natural and well-formed state of all, there is an immediate and total recognition that this is how you were designed to be. Life, with all its warts and imperfections, seems perfect. And you have a sense that anything is possible.

When you're not in it, it's like there's a splinter in your mind. The only solution is to re-establish the state.

When working with a client, I elicit this state in a full-blown way so that they can experience it for themselves. (DM me if you're interested in becoming a client.)

(Early on, for reasons I'll explain in a future newsletter, it's much easier to have an outside operator guide you into the state. But, it's possible for you to do it on your own. Keep reading to find out how.)

To continue our computer metaphor, eliciting someone's at-best state is like rebooting the client's system.?After the reboot, at least temporarily, you feel great and whatever core issues we resolved during the session will be significantly, if not permanently, resolved and integrated.

However, most people have more than one virus running in the system, so even though the system is now calibrating towards your deepest and "best" self, those viruses will reemerge and begin to exert themselves. They will pull the system off center in ways that are almost invisible, because they come in the form of habits you've had for years, if not decades.

This is where the Networks of Intelligence come in handy.

Remember, each Network develops in ways that are:

• well-formed
• unformed
• ill-formed

If it's the first, we say they are Green Zoned.

If it's the latter two, they are in the Red Zone.

Green Zoned networks and their related behaviors allow and encourage the healthy and stable expression of the natural, best version of you to be expressed.

Networks that have Red Zone qualities stifle and discourage the expression of your best self.

In other words, they create incoherence in the expression of the perfect you.?

We need to ensure each network is healthy so it's shaped and oriented to support the expression of your best self.

It's critical to address the early networks immediately.

If your car doesn't have gas, if your computer doesn't have power - they simply won't go. Obvious issues arise too if they have a cracked screen or a broken mouse pad.

If your human operating system (and specifically your brain) isn't getting what it needs, it won't do what you want.

This is the reason that if you're feeling bad, the first self-check is always:

• am I hungry?
• am I thirsty?
• am I tired?

You also need to check:

• am I running stress through my body?
• have I shifted out of my best state?

These latter checks have to do with the Parameters of your Attention.

Access your Inner Buddha by tweaking the Parameters your Attention

Attentional Parameters dictate the shape of your awareness, which dictates your fundamental experience of reality, and your ability to perform.

Together, taken all at once, they form your Operating Position.

Change your Operating Position and you change your entire experience of reality.

While most of psychology has been fixated on tinkering with how you think about things, the secret to being at your best is all about stabilizing your Operating Position. You want it to always be set to "at best".

For the philosophers among you, this is the difference between epistemology and ontology. One has to do with your way of knowing, the other has to do with your way of Being.

Changing important Attentional Parameter changes the shape of your entire Awareness, so let's get a little more familiar with how it works.

Here's a Common Example

600 trillion American adolescents now suffer from anxiety. The situation is not much better with adults.

Operating from the deep, well-formed experience of being "at your best" = all the good things I've already mentioned.

Add anxiety and the experience changes radically.

Anxiety alters the raw, fundamental parameters of awareness.

The two states feel remarkably different.

You want to recognize the difference!

But how?

Get familiar with the Parameters of your Attention and learn to tweak them.

Look at the difference between the two figures below. The first shows a person at their best.

The second shows a person with anxiety added into the system.

Below the images is a list of common traits associated with the Parameters of how their Attention is organized.

The above images and table offer common differences in how someone organizes their Attentional Parameters when they are at their best versus when they are not.

In computer lingo, a lot of the stuff in the above table would be considered low level code.?That means the fundamental elements of how the machine of you is organized. Optimizing these low-level parameters is how we stabilize your access to this fundamental way of being.

Correct major outstanding issues of how your hardware is cared for and organized by giving it what it needs (proper nutrition, sleep, hydration, sunlight, etc) and organizing your muscles and senses to their optimal configuration.

This is super practical stuff and the benefits of attending to it cannot be overstated.

We'll get deeper into exercises and practices to further support and accelerate your abilities in our next edition.

If you enjoy Evolving Humanity, please share this newsletter on LI now or send it to friends who would appreciate it. Questions and comments are always welcome!

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Keep reading the newsletter and you'll get better at establishing your At-Best Operating Position. The more you do, the happier and more fulfilled you'll be more of the time in every context with everyone, especially yourself. This is fundamental to Evolving Humanity.